


Three Little Words.

by Littleshebear



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Developing Romance, F/M, Humour, Love Confessions, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-24 02:07:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17695571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Littleshebear/pseuds/Littleshebear
Summary: Hawthorne tries and fails to tell Zavala how she feels about him. Crippling embarrassment ensues.





	Three Little Words.

“Okay, Suraya.” Hawthorne stands in front of the mirror, shrugs her shoulders then pushes them back, forcing herself into a confident stance. If she looks it, maybe she’ll feel it. “This is easy,” she tells herself. “He’ll be there by now, he’s always early. Just show up before anyone else gets there, march up to him, tell him how you feel.”

She takes a moment to reconsider her wording. “No don’t ‘march.’ No marching. Just walk up to him like a normal person. But he might like marching. It’s forthright. Argh!” She buries her face in her hands and admonishes herself for overthinking this. It’s just three little words. It shouldn’t be this hard. What’s the worst that could happen?

 _He doesn’t reciprocate_ , a voice in the back of her mind chimes in, _it crushes me emotionally, so I scurry back to the EDZ to live out the rest of my days as an angry hermit, until I get eaten by a bear._

She takes a deep breath and turns to Louis. “Wish me luck.” Louis stares back at her and chirps quietly. “Thanks for the support, buddy.” She leaves her apartment and makes her way to the Consensus chamber, telling herself the worst won’t happen. It  _won’t_ , she’s fairly sure she’s read him correctly and that he feels the same way. Zavala respects her, he almost always backs her plays during consensus meetings. He’s kind. He tells her she’s beautiful without prompting. But that nagging, fearful doubt refuses to be silenced. Respect is not love. Kindness is not love. Physical attraction is not love. She never expected any commitment from him nor he from her but if she tells him this, she’ll change the state of play between them. He’d have every right not to accept that.

By the time she reaches the plenary chamber, her stomach is roiling, her heart racing.  She presses a sweaty palm against the door and pushes it open. As she expected, the room is empty save for Zavala, her…what? What is Zavala to her, exactly? Her friend? Her colleague? Her lover? Her partner? No, he’s definitely not that, not yet anyway. Perhaps after she’s said what she needs to.

Zavala is seated on the dais, to the left of the Speaker’s now perpetually empty chair. He’s reading from a tablet, probably going over the agenda one last time, checking or more likely rechecking relevant data. He’s not one to waste time, he’s seldom idle. She feels a sharp pang of worry as she  wonders if he slept last night. The eve of a Consensus meeting is always a particularly restless time for him. The noise of the door creaking shut behind her alerts him to her presence and he looks up from his studies. He stands and descends the dais steps to meet her.

“Suraya,” he looks pleased to see her, as pleased as Zavala ever looks. There are tiny giveaways for those who know what to look for; a sympathetic tilt of his head, a slight deepening of the lines around his eyes. She _can_  read him, she tells herself. She prays she’s read him right. “You’re here early.”

She nods, “I wanted to-” She breaks off to cough, her mouth and throat suddenly feel as dry as a desert. “I wanted to catch you before, uhm…” She mentally kicks herself as she clears her throat again. Water. Why didn’t she bring a bottle of water?

“Are you all right?” He looks at her attentively, a frown beginning to form.

“I’m fine.” She insists, with forced brightness. “Fine!” This isn’t off to a good start and she can feel heat rising in her cheeks. “I uhm, ahem, I just wanted to…” She trails off, telling herself this isn’t hard, this shouldn’t be so hard. The way he’s looking at her now, it’s so obvious he cares, if she can just say those words, it’ll be all fine. I love you. It’s just three little syllables, so easy to say but her tongue feels too big while her lungs feel like they’ve shrunk to a fraction of their normal size.

“You’re flushed.” He steps forward and gently lays his hand on her brow. “Are you sick?”

With that, her blush deepens and the last of her courage deserts her. “You know, I have been feeling a little tired. Maybe I  _am_  coming down with something.”

“Why didn’t you call? You didn’t need to come in.”

“We were going to discuss the expeditionary force-”

“We’re on the same page there, I can handle that. Go home.”

Suraya feels her neck retracting back into her shoulders, her face sinking deeper into her poncho, like some sort of cripplingly embarrassed turtle. “Are you sure?”

“I wouldn’t say it if I weren’t. Honestly, I’ve got this. You look miserable, get some rest.”

“Okay,” she acquiesces in a tiny, defeated voice before turning to leave. “I’ll call you.”

“Get well.” He shoots her one of those rare smiles, those reserved for special occasions and certain privileged individuals. She forces a sheepish smile back at him before retreating towards the exit and home (or whatever hole in the ground that would be generous enough to swallow her up).

* * *

Later that day, Suraya lies on her couch, on her front, one leg and one arm lolling off the side. She’s watching some god awful family drama vid on her tablet, anything to take her mind off the utter disaster that was her attempt at emotional honesty with Zavala. Louis awakens from a nap, stretching his wings and fixing his eyes on her.

“Dunno why you’re looking at me like that.” She glares at him, not moving from her position on the couch. Her speech is distorted by the cushion she rests her head on pushing her mouth askew. “This isn’t funny.” Louis begins grooming himself with a nonchalance that seems designed to irritate her.

Suraya snorts, turns and buries her face in the cushion. She contemplates messaging Zavala for about the fifteenth time that day but can never figure out exactly what it is she’d say.  _Funny story: I’m in love with you and I meant to say it but you mistook it for me being ill and now I’m so embarrassed, I probably won’t leave my apartment for at least a week_. She decides against it, partly from embarrassment, partly from that shameful cowardice that still paralyses her but another thought occurs to her. What if this is for the best? She assumed that he would either requite her love or reject her. A third eventuality arises in her mind: What if he does feel the same way but won’t take the next step out of a sense of duty? What if he won’t commit to a relationship because his other duties would prevent him from spending enough time with her? It’s entirely possible that the City was and always will be his first love and she’ll come in a distant second. She can imagine Zavala telling her she deserves someone better than a lonely workaholic all too clearly. That would be a very Zavala thing to do, it’s just the sort of self-sacrificing, magnanimous bullshit that he would go for.

She decides it probably would just be better to leave things as they are rather than risk him pushing her away. At least that way she should could still be with him, not exactly in the way she wants but at least she’d have him. Despite her telling herself that it’s the best option, the thought of staying in that emotional limbo causes a lump to rise in her throat and her sinuses to prickle, heralding the arrival of self-indulgent tears. Her incipient crying fit is suddenly halted by the sound of the doorbell.

Suraya looks up at the door and calls out, “Who is it?

A muffled voice on the other side replies, “Delivery!”

She gets up and crosses to the door, opening it a crack. “I haven’t ordered anything,” she says in an irritated voice.

A young deliveryman looks up at her nervously, probably wondering why she looks so annoyed with him. “Suraya Hawthorne?”

“Yes?” She snaps.

He holds up a paper bag that smells faintly of chicken and lemongrass. “Take out. It’s paid for.” He maneuvers the bag into her hands, obviously eager to retreat. “Enjoy.”

Suraya shuts the door after him, looking at the bag in confusion. She sets it down on the coffee table and opens it to reveal a pot with a fitted plastic lid, which she removes to see that the pot is full of chicken noodle soup. Her stomach rumbles and her mouth waters at the smell, suddenly remembering that with all the wallowing, she hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast. She rummages in the bag and finds a payment receipt and glances past the price and delivery details until she reaches a section at the bottom -

_SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS:_

_MSG: Thought you might be too tired to cook. Feel better. - Z._

The shame and embarrassment in her flares up anew. “Oh no. He bought me soup. Louis, he bought me chicken soup.” She reads that simple little message over and over, cursing the fact that he has to be so damn  _nice_  all the time. This is hard enough to deal with without him going and being thoughtful on top of it. She was doing fine until she met him. Her life was so uncomplicated until he turned up with his bravery and his compassion and his poetry and his kind eyes and his strong arms and his gentle hands and his stupid chicken noodle soup. She fetches a spoon from the kitchen and flops back down on the sofa, telling herself she’ll only eat this because she’s hungry and it’s there. She resolves not to enjoy it as she takes a spoonful.

“Oh _damn_ , that is good soup.”


End file.
